Special Guest Blogger: Dr. David Livingstone

Growing up in Scotland, i was an avid reader especially of religious and explorer texts and i became a missionary and was persuaded that the heathen African's needed saving so i sailed off to South Africa and set up a missionary and got attacked by a lion but the African's didn't seem that bothered about learning about God so i decided as i was there i may as map the African rivers instead.
With the help of some African guides, i set off down the Zambezi and discovered a waterfall which the locals called the Mosi-oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders") but i kindly renamed it Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria for them. Despite almost dying from a fever and suffering almost daily attacks from spear chucking African tribes, i eventually reached the Indian Ocean, having mapped most of the course of the Zambezi and returned to Britain a hero, i wrote up my story with an artistic flourish and the Royal Geographical Society presented me with their gold medal and if i had just stopped there i would be rich and famous but i had the explorers itch and not just from the lice.
Another expedition set off using my book as a guide and due to my artistic flourishes, they set off thinking they were going for a fairly pleasant cruise through the jungle with wholly inadequate supplies and most died but i was already planning my next exploration to Zanzibar to find the source of the River Nile.
Upon arrival i was extremely ill and was saved by Arab traders who gave me medicines and carried me to an Arab outpost where i caught pneumonia and Cholera and the guides i hired decided one by one that they weren't as curious as me where the Nile started and nicked off with my supplies.
The number one fear for most explorers is getting captured and eaten by cannibals but a very close second is getting captured and made a human exhibit in a zoo which is exactly what happened while stumbling through the jungle on my own, mapping out rivers and marshes and fending off every disease the jungle could throw at me when i found a tribe who weren't used to seeing too many white people and offered to feed me if i sat in a roped-off enclosure for the entertainment of the locals.
I was gone for years, the thieving native guides said that i had probably died in the jungle after they abandoned me but when rumours reached back home that a white man was seen in the African jungle, another explorer, Henry Stanley, went looking for me. When he finally found me, i was crippled with dysentery and he greeted me with "Dr Livingstone, I presume?
As that phrase became famous i wish i had come up with a better answer than 'I don't suppose you bought any toilet roll did you?
Most accounts end this story here as i refused the rescue and wandered back into the jungle where i promptly died of malaria which is why they usually leave that part out.